IT Operations Management

AI and ITIL: Making the Help Desk More Efficient

How efficient is your help desk? It’s a simple enough question that should be easy to answer. For many companies, the response is that it’s not – there’s a large backlog that the help desk staff simply can’t tackle.

AI can help organizations solve that problem. When combined with AI, ITIL becomes much more efficient. Read on to learn how the combination of AI and ITSM streamlines service desk operations.

The Current State of Your Help Desk

When you think about the current state of your help desk, ask yourself what kind of backlog your staff is facing. Are they able to easily handle tickets, or can it take them days (if not longer) to even look at a request for help? And what kinds of requests are they dealing with – is it mostly password resets, or are these tickets issues that genuinely affect your business operations?

Some of the most common problems have a negative impact on end-users’ ability to do their work: password resets, an inability to print documents, being locked out of an application (or worse, locked out of their computer), or a log-in failure. However, those issues aren’t mission-critical; your company’s overall success doesn’t rest on those problems being solved. Yet, these are the issues that take up most of your help desk staff’s time, causing them to put things such as security and server maintenance on the proverbial back burner.

How Can You Streamline Your Help Desk?

To make your help desk more efficient, you need to find a way to free up your help desk staff from these time-consuming tickets. How can you do that while still satisfying users? That’s where AI comes in.

An AI-enabled ITSM solution offers users a way to access self-service capabilities. Let’s say the user needs to reset his password. He would navigate to either a knowledge base or open a chatbot window and type in his question.

“Forrester Research estimates the average cost of a single password reset call to the IT desk is $70”

The knowledge base or chatbot would review any previous cases that involved password resets. Within a few moments, the AI-enabled ITSM solution would be able to return a set of results to the user. A few clicks later, and the user resets his password, accesses his computer, and is able to go about his day.

At this point in time, AI can’t solve every conceivable problem. There will be times that the AI-enabled ITSM solution will need to turn to a human for help. In that case, the solution will pass off the ticket to a human member of the help desk staff.

Self-service capabilities allow end-users to get back to work much faster. Instead of waiting for days or longer for an answer to a question, users can have a response in under a few minutes. That also means help desk staff can get back to work faster, making the company as a whole more efficient.